Several weeks ago, Nokia sent me a N90 to review. It's a nice-looking smartphone with a built-in 2 megapixel camera and a digital video camera.
I already have a mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson T616, which suits me fine. The only thing I don't like about the T616 is the awful camera, which takes tiny, muddy, washed out pictures that are truly worse than useless. If he were still alive, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce himself would complain about the quality of the T616's photographs.
So it was a surprising treat to use the N90's camera, which takes comparatively clean and colorful photos. The video camera also take nice shots.
The good news about the N90, at least for me, ends here.
The trouble with the phone is that it is hard to figure out in almost every way.
One major beef is the phone's multi-axis, Rubik's cube-esque, swivel-socket-hinge joints that allow you to unfold it in seemingly dozens of configurations. Every time I wanted to take a photo, I found myself scrambling to unfold and twist the camera, succeeding mainly in smearing its highly-touted Zeiss lens with finger sebum. My 8-year-old daughter had more fun with this aspect of the N90. By twisting and folding it in different ways, she was able to make it look like a duck, a giraffe, and a butterfly.
As a communicator, I found the N90 to be equally confusing. When I got my T616, I never had to crack open the manual, but the N90 is so feature-rich that its UI designers must have had trouble coming up with an elegant interface to deal with its many capabilities. I found myself pressing way too many buttons just to make a simple voice call. At one point, I inadvertently ended up in a sub-menu that gave me the option to trigger a catastrophic phase transition of the space-time continuum. (I powered down the N90 and put it in the freezer overnight, just to be safe.)
Two other gripes: First, the N90 is too large. It's too big for my pants pocket. I like little phones. Second, there's no vibrate mode, which by itself is a deal killere. I like to keep my phone silent and in my pocket, it's just not possible with the N90.
I don't know who this phone is for, but it's not for me.
